He knew. He knew my real name.
He smiled. “You must understand, Miss Walton. I did not wish to restrain you, but your behavior left me with little choice.” His eyes flicked toward the guard. “Dupree,” he said. “Have you made the proper arrangements with Patient Smith?”
“Yeah, Doc,” Dupree said. “Man’s trussed like a Christmas goose.”
“Hurry along, then. I don’t have all day.”
We stopped before a door just like my own. Another guard stood watch, a leather-wrapped cudgel in his fist.
“Quiet today, Doc,” the thick-necked guard said, keying the door open. He stuck his head inside and shouted, “Ain’t gonna cause no trouble, are ya, you mad bastard?”
Carson frowned at the guard. “This, Mr. Malloy, is a fashionable establishment. I’ll thank you to keep the obscenities to yourself.” He waved a hand at the guards, who both stared at me with avid faces. “Leave us. Wait at the end of the hallway. I’ll call for you when we are done.”
Something shifted within the darkened room. A shuffling. The clink of chains. I had to cover my nose and mouth to keep from gagging at the malignant odor that oozed from inside.
My feet didn’t want to move, but Carson pulled me forward through the doorway. Without letting go of my arm, he reached out. A click, and the giant bulb that dangled overhead sparked into life, exposing smeared and dingy walls. Green spots danced in my vision and I had to blink a few times to clear it.
At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. A pile of rags. A scarecrow crouched in a far corner. Heavy chains looped through iron wall rings and ran down to manacles that wrapped around stick-thin wrists and ankles.
“What is this?” I whispered.
The huddled creature raised its head. A pair of red-rimmed eyes met mine. And it felt like every particle of the room’s foul air flooded into my lungs all at once.
The last time I’d seen him he’d been dressed in chain mail and tunic, not some torn and filthy smock. The white-blond hair was long now, tangled and greasy, except for two oddly shaved areas on either temple. His face had aged tremendously, but there was no mistaking the man’s identity.
A line of drool stretched from one corner of his shrunken mouth, leaving a dark circle on a food-encrusted smock.
“No.” I tried to back up, but the doctor blocked me. “Impossible. He’s . . . He’s . . .”
“You know this man?” The doctor grunted in genuine surprise. “How fascinating. I’d no idea. I only wanted the two of you to meet, as I believe Patient Smith has much in common with you and I.
“The man was already a patient at Bellevue when I arrived here nigh on thirty years ago. The physician over his case had given up on treatment. I convinced him to let me take over Smith’s care, and when I built this hospital, I brought him with me. But how could you possibly know—”
I could no longer hear Carson. The room had begun to spin in a swirl of white on white, until all I could focus on was the revenant of the human being I’d met only months before.
Chains clinked as the now-old man raised his arm, pointed a long, yellowed nail directly at me. “Wiiiitch.”
I flinched as the gravelly sound of his voice skittered across my skin like a thousand roaches.
Eustace Clarkson.
Lackey. Brute. Would-be rapist. Guard of the London City Watch, in the year of our Lord, 1154.
It wasn’t as if I’d had a choice. He’d already knocked Bran unconscious, and would have killed us both. But not before he’d done much, much worse to me.
The entrance to the chasm had been right there and the man had been strong, yes. But also stupid.
I learned then that killing someone is surprisingly easy when you have no other option. I shoved. He fell. And Eustace Clarkson had disappeared into the Dim, where no final thud ended his horrible screams.
I still hear him sometimes when I wake in the night.
“It’s impossible,” I whispered. “He’s dead. I saw him fall. I—”
Eustace lunged at me. Broken, blackened teeth bared, fingers curled into claws. Rage and madness and fury. I leapt back, slammed into the wall. The chains arrested his advance, jerking him backwards like a rabid dog.
He slammed to his knees, muttering to himself as he signed the cross over and over. “Demons. Demons. Demons everywhere. Lightning in my head. Witch girl in my room. Kill her. Kill the lightning man.”
Carson cast a hand out at the pitiful scrap that once had been Eustace Clarkson. “A year or two before I arrived, the police found him in an alley in Five Points, beaten near to death. The constables brought him to Bellevue, where he claimed to be a knight brought back from Hades.” ?The doctor swallowed. “Having made that particular journey myself, I must say I understood the sentiment.”
I was suddenly exhausted. Too bone-tired to pretend anymore as I watched Eustace lunge against his chains again and again, each time growing weaker as he rasped, “Kill the demon witch. Kill the lightning man. Kill them. Kill them all.”
“He’s from London,” I said. “Twelfth century. But he was no knight.”
Carson shook his head. “Incredible. As you can see, the man is no conversationalist, and I admit there’ve been times I’ve longed to speak to someone who truly understands my circumstance. I only wish you and I had more time to chat of that world we left behind. Unfortunately, I’ve had to make other arrangements for you.” He sighed. “A shame, really.”
“Arrangements?” I asked, my gaze straying to the shaved—?and now that I looked closer—?scorched areas on Eustace’s temples.
He’d called Carson “lightning man.”
“I must, of course, be wary of drawing too much attention too quickly. You’ve no idea how difficult it’s been to wait decades on appropriate modernization. Patient Smith was the only one I dared experiment on. But brain surgery has been in practice in some form or another since the ancient Egyptians. It was not too huge a leap for me to introduce its utilization in psychiatric medicine.”
And the old shall be made new again.
Carson withdrew a small leather notebook. Scribbling, he asked, “What year, exactly, did you come from? I—?for instance—?am originally from 1983.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He looked at me curiously. “How did you come to cross over?”
“Probably the same way you did.”
Carson laughed. “I do hope it didn’t cost you as much as it did me.”
“How much did you pay the Timeslippers? That’s what happened, right? They hid you so you wouldn’t go to jail.”